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The bitcoin hardware manufacturer has hired three top contributors to bitcoin.org for breeding a new generation of cryptocurrency developers.

The best funded bitcoin start-up 21 Inc., which has recently unveiled its unique Bitcoin Computer, now presents a non-commercial educational project. The 21 tutorial platform will teach novice developers, who have no specific knowledge of cryptography, how the bitcoin protocol works.  

The company has hired Saivann Carignan, David Harding and Will Binns, three renowned authors of bitcoin.org, to run the portal. Moreover, 21 Inc. is ready to pay up to $200 in bitcoins to those who want to write or translate a tutorial.

“There’s a tiny number of Bitcoin wizards, and an enormous number of smart developers that have no on-ramp to Bitcoin. We need to make that onramp easier,” the start-up’s co-founder Balaji Srinivasan told TechCrunch.

The step-by-step tutorials aimed at an average developer, “the person who knows broadly how to code, but comes from a background in another area like graphics or web development rather than cryptography.”  They will have a chance to learn “the basics behind bitcoin”, such as digital signatures or bitcoin mining. Each tutorial contains snippets of code; the knowledge database will be updated on a weekly basis. After completing the beginners course, users can proceed to advanced Bitcoin Developer Documentation, which will allow them to build smart contracts or autonomous corporations.

“Starting with the basics of cryptographic hashes and digital signatures, these tutorials will provide you with hands-on experience using Bitcoin and the Blockchain. Each tutorial contains about one hour of material, to make it easy to learn a little bit every day but still quickly acquire mastery over Bitcoin’s core concepts,” the portal reads.

21 Inc. encourages developers to use its Bitcoin Computer with a built-in mining chip, a pre-loaded blockchain and pre-configured software adapted for bitcoin clients and servers. However, the company also provides an instruction on how to set up a bitcoin development environment without buying the device.

The 21 Inc. sees its Bitcoin Computer as a solution for infrastructure problem, as was the integration of TCP/IP Internet protocol into Windows 95 operating system. While in early days users had to install the drivers from floppy disk manually, the integration allowed “enormous new cohort of engineers” to learn how to code for the Web.

In March 21 Inc. managed to attract more than $116 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective, Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures, Yuan Capitals and others. In April 2015 the company announced their plans to insert bitcoin mining chip “into every iron”. On 21 September the company announced the release of a new kind of computer with native hardware and software support for the bitcoin protocol. This week 21 Inc. revealed its initiative aimed at maintaining the critical mass of bitcoin full nodes. The company launched Bitnodes project, which allows to measure the number of full nodes currently operating and Bitnodes Incentive Program, rewarding miners for running a full node.

 

Nadya Krasnushkina